Petty Treasons Read online

  Petty Treasons

  Victoria Goddard

  Copyright © 2021 by Victoria Goddard

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  For Alexandra Rowland, with thanks

  Contents

  1. The New Secretary

  2. Small Miracles

  3. Great Magics

  4. The Littleridge Treaty

  1

  The New Secretary

  It was a beautiful space, the official study of the Last Emperor of Astandalas.

  You—the Last Emperor, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Sun-on-Earth, the god—paced the long room. Fifteen strides up, twenty-five down, ten back to your desk. Your yellow robes swished pleasantly against your legs. Heavy silk; Imperial Yellow in colour. A dye compounded of ingredients from five worlds, used only for the person of the Emperor himself.

  Yourself.

  (Myself.)

  Perfume wafted around you, faint notes of roses and ambergris and that cedar-like unguent from extreme eastern Voonra whose name you always forgot. In your mouth the air was cool, sweet, like water.

  The walls were made of polished kyrian alabaster, chosen to be as free from inclusions or admixtures of colour as possible. Each white panel was carved very shallowly with a tracery of vines that took every faintest hint of another colour and transformed them into deliberate lines, refusing to admit even the hint of a shadow, a flaw.

  The walls cradled the early morning light tenderly, the translucent stone glowing. Back when you yourself had glowed, faintly shining even in your most ordinary moments, the walls had glimmered in the corners of your eyes, white and gold upon white and gold, so refulgent it was hard to see the corners of the room.

  There were windows, deep-set in embrasures that were screened with more carved alabaster, under eaves that prevented any direct sunlight from entering, even when the sun was very low in the winter sky, back when this palace had been in temperate Astandalas the Golden, not equatorial Solaara.

  (Such a strange and terrible mystery, that translation of a building and its inhabitants—one building and its inhabitants—from one world to another, when the magic that bound an empire of five worlds together crumbled and fell. You—I—did not understand what had happened; nobody did.)

  Your path traced the spaces between the windows and doors: fifteen strides up, to the table at the top of the room on which stood a jewelled mechanical nightingale in a golden cage; twenty-five down, to the doors set with ivory and ebony panels that led deeper into the Imperial Apartments; ten back up, to the desk made of intricately carved sandalwood from southern Voonra.

  You brushed our hand lightly across the edge of the desk, silken-smooth golden wood, aromatic, barely a sensation on your fingertips.

  Two windows on the outer wall, either side of the nightingale. If you stopped a few paces back, at the point where you could just see the spear of the lefthand guard in the corner of your eye, you could see through the alabaster tracery.

  There was not much of a view given the angle of the Emperor’s Tower and the fine disregard of the architect to any possible desire to look out. In Astandalas you had been able to see a fragmented wedge of the city, smoke rising up over tiled roofs. Sometimes there had been pigeons, and in the winter great billowing murmurations of starlings.

  Here the windows faced northeast, and you could see the line of a river meandering to the sea that stretched out across the horizon. White birds wheeled past: gulls and terns and egrets, and sometimes, sometimes, there would be a flight of multicoloured parrots rising up from the gardens or pink flamingos returning to the salt pans in the south.

  One of the guards shifted his weight from one foot to the other, the butt of his spear scraping quietly across the floor, some metal item about his person clinking. Otherwise there was no sound but the snap of your sandals on the floor as you started to pace again, the swish of your robes about your legs, the waiting for the next bell to sound.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk. You kept your hands loosely clasped behind your back and your face serene, your shoulders down. Perhaps you might change out the art on the long eastern wall, you mused, pausing with your back to the outer door.

  The left half of the wall was exterior, gently luminous in the morning light, but the righthand side had rooms behind it, and the wall was opaque by comparison. One of the chambers was accessed through the next room in of the inner apartments; the other had a door to this one. That had been a service room once, before you became emperor, kept hidden behind a vast canvas painted with the pornography your uncle the previous emperor had … favoured.

  (It was art, the best of it, for all that all of it was pornographic, and even though the genre hadn’t in itself entirely bothered me—albeit I knew I—you—you the new Emperor, plucked out of exile to take the throne—you were expected to find it strange—some of the subjects were disturbingly young. Nothing I had found out about the previous emperor endeared him to me.)

  When you had come to the throne, unexpectedly and to no one’s satisfaction, all of the art had been burned in a parody of the ceremonies of purification. You had had them scour all the rooms in the Apartments to the bare stone.

  There was no privacy in the life of an emperor. Apparently your uncle had found that, or learned to find that, titillating.

  You paced.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk. The current pictures were ones you had chosen in those first, bewildering months after being crowned Emperor. Five paintings of landscapes, one from each of the five worlds under the rule of Astandalas, empty of people and serene of effect.

  The one from Zunidh was outdated, depicting as it did the classical heartland of the Empire, Kavanor of the first cities. From the reports most of the continent of Kavanduru had fallen into the ocean, and Kavanor was nothing more than a few remnant islands and a turbulent new sea.

  (Northern Dair had been covered by lava flows, and half of what had been the Northern Ocean was a boiling expanse of near-volcanoes. There was a wall of storms across the Wide Seas, a chain of typhoons and hurricanes and cyclones drifting from one sea to the next. Very little had been reported from Southern Dair past the near edge of the Erchilingian jungle.)

  You did not know what had happened to the rolling hills of the Geir in the northern Vale of Astandalas on Ysthar; or to the fantastic forests of giant bamboo on southern Voonra; or to the Sea of Pinnacles on Colhélhé; or to Orio Bay and the island of Nên Corovel on Alinor.

  The passages between the worlds of the Empire, so straightforward, even mundane, under the magic of Astandalas, were now hazardous ventures indeed. There had been a few reports of people lost in the Borderlands who had stumbled out on Zunidh, but their stories had been nightmarish and unclear.

  What could you put in place of these landscapes of lost realms?

  (Lost responsibilities, no longer mine to worry over, to govern or to judge or to ruin.)

  There had been a tapestry, you recalled, tribute from Colhélhé. A hand-woven chart of the the full extent of the Empire at its height, beautiful and accurate without being too detailed. Accurate enough, even now, you suspected. A reminder.

  You turned towards the empty desk your new secretary would be using, as soon as the next candidate arrived. You could set him that task, couldn’t you? To go wrangle with the Treasurer to find the tapestry map?

  Yes. If you remembered correctly the map should extend most of the length of the wall. It would add a certain warmth to the austere room, without marring the general effect.

  It was a beautiful room, you considered, if perhaps a trifle empty. Things had broken during the Fall which had not yet been replaced. There had been a fine sculpture of a chained lion on a marble plinth, there, tribute from a conquered city, memento—not exactly mori. Perhaps it had been meant as a reminder that the wheel of fortune turned even for emperors.

  The sculpture had made of your pacing triangle a rhombus. Or perhaps it was a trapezoid?

  (I had never cared all that much for geometry; but I did, had always, would always, care about using the correct word.)

  The chained lion had been a trifle too apt, you reflected, turning again at your desk, glancing up at the one moment you could see the sea through the windows, lowering your gaze to the floor as you swept past your guards, gripping your hands together behind your back, just for a moment, when only your face was to them.

  The new secretary was not actually late.

  You paced, aware at a level simmering just below conscious thought that it was ten minutes to the ringing of the hour-bell and the coming of the next candidate.

  Your guards stood at precise, unvarying, perfect attention. There was not much room for the expression of personality, standing at precise, perfect, unvarying attention for six hours at a time. You did try to learn their names; you had not had any occasion to say them outside of accepting their oaths of service. You did not have even that for any of your other attendants.

  Sergei, the senior, was on the right; Ludvic, the junior, on the left.

  You were the single most important person in the Nine Worlds. You had learned not to ask too much of those around you. For one thing, it was never taken as asking: even your most carefully casual comment was taken as an implicit order. You had learne
d to keep your thoughts to yourself after a wistful comment about cherry blossoms had ended up with the College of Wizards rearranging the entire magic and most of the climatological system of Ysthar to provide a new season in the Vale of Astandalas.

  Now that you were the Lord Magus of Zunidh, and no longer technically Emperor of Astandalas (no longer because Astandalas had fallen in a great and terrible cataclysm; only technically because the subjects of the remaining portion of the empire refused to accept this demotion), no one could do such a wholesale work of magic besides you.

  They could still interpret your comments as the next thing to a new decree.

  And to be honest—not that you had much opportunity to be honest—the Fall of Astandalas had largely put paid to such great works of magic. You struggled more than you had let anyone see with wrestling the broken and distorted magic of Zunidh. You had wrought no magic, all that time as Emperor, and though your magic had awoken with you after the Fall, it was still … unruly.

  The College of Wizards had crowned you Lord Magus, when the previous lady had thrust the role onto you in panicked relief, but no one really thought you could do more than the barest minimum with respect to the magic. It burned that you had not yet been able to prove them wrong, that all you could do was be the centre around which the rest turned.

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk.

  It was better, proper, courteous to keep your thoughts to yourself, and your expectations for companionship low.

  You did insist your chief attendants not be wholly and unbearably obsequious. This had proven a much more difficult thing to achieve than you had ever countenanced.

  In the three years—or so; one of the problems concomitant on the Fall was the bizarre and nearly incomprehensible disarray of time—since you had awoken from the coma induced by the Fall, you had gone through seven grooms of the chamber and well over a dozen personal secretaries.

  You were beginning to fear you would have to settle for impenetrable formality as the best you could hope for, the wall of thorns around the sleeping, silent castle. A barricade, at once protection and barrier.

  When you were Emperor the taboos had been iron bands around you. They had delineated everything about your life, from what moment you were awakened through to when you were finally able to close the bed-curtains and for seven blissful hours not be seen by anyone but yourself.

  You had not been able to avoid seeing yourself, when you were Emperor, for the magic inherent in the position had made you glow. It had been bright enough to read by, when you were unable to sleep.

  You had had to create a soft mage-light, the first few months after you had woken after the Fall, so accustomed had you finally become to the ever-present illumination. (It had been at once a triumph, for the magic worked, and a shattering grief, for I—you—I—needed it.) Your guards had said nothing, though they had called attendants to check on you, the first time you had endeavoured to go to sleep without the light. They had feared for your life, when the light went out. You could not blame them for that. All the lights had gone out when Astandalas Fell.

  After that they seemed to have taken the old Imperial fiction of the divinity of the Emperors and made it into literal, worshipped, fact. Even your attendants; even your guards. They saw you in every room, every state, every moment, except for those precious few minutes each day in your private study, those hours behind the curtains on your bed; and perhaps that was enough, for them to take you as divine.

  (I had always been good at showing people what they wanted to see.)

  Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk. You stopped to regard the outer wall again, the faint tracery of carvings on the luminous stone. Outside the sun was climbing high, no longer reflected on the sea. You had not been outside for … two months, was it?

  You had lost count. That was a good thing, you supposed. You had kept an obsessive count of all the hours it had been since you became Emperor.

  (Fourteen years, four months, four days, seventeen hours, and then the Fall.)

  There was a soft knock on the outer door. You did not turn while one of the guards answered and spoke to the guards on the other side. It was five minutes to the hour, the third hour since dawn, nine of the old clock: your guards changed at dawn and noon and dusk and midnight, precisely six hours apart here on the Equator. This was not that, and so therefore it was the new secretary-candidate.

  One of the guards (the righthand guard, Sergei, from the direction of the sound) thumped the butt of his spear down on the floor in the quiet, easily-ignored indication that someone who was expected had arrived.

  It was up to you, of course, to condescend to greet whoever it was.

  You flicked your hand to indicate they might open the door to the new secretary.

  You stared at the wall, the painting of the plains of Kavanor, the hilltop cities, for a moment longer. And where were they now, those ancient cities lost to Yr the Conqueror, first Emperor of Astandalas and your ancestor after nearly one hundred generations? Audar, Essur, Kithor, Zard. All gone, razed by ancient armies, their ruins fallen into the sea.

  You could hear the new secretary breathing; his breath came faster than the guards at parade rest. No doubt the man (woman?) was nervous. You had dismissed the last candidate halfway through his obeisances for the miasma of pure blind terror the man had projected from an untrained magical gift.

  This candidate had no gift of magic, trained or otherwise. You traced out the taste of magic in the air, straining against the heavy weight of wizardry here in the heart of the Palace, the former heart of the Empire, still the heart of Zunidh.

  The new secretary was from far away—still of Zunidh, but there was a glimpse of—what was it?

  A night scene: a small, unfamiliar boat, a man—two men?—upon it, sails catching starlit wind, the doubled prow plunging through black waters and brilliant phosphorescence, the sea to the horizon, the stars above bright and clear and familiar, pearls floating down the River of Stars, the spaces between as luminous as the waves—

  A gift of a moment, a place far away, a hint of friendship and adventure … Nothing for you, but for the briefest scent of salt as the vision faded.

  You blinked back the hint of tears before you turned.

  Not that anyone would be looking at your face, but even so. Even so.

  The door was closed, and the new secretary-candidate stood framed by the two guards.

  Next to their perfect physiognomy and height, he was decidedly ordinary. Average. He was dressed in the uniform of the Imperial Bureaucratic Service with no indicators of rank outside his status as a, yes, Fifth-Level Secretary. The pale grey-brown linen did no favours to anyone’s colouring.

  “Cliopher sayo Mdang, Glorious One,” Ludvic announced. His Azilinti accent made the a in ang sound out long and sharp. Mi-daaang.

  Sayo? This was the first time the Master of Offices had sent anyone not of noble rank as a secretary, which suggested that either the Service was even more thinly staffed than you had thought, or that this unassuming man was extraordinary. Or perhaps both.

  (Eventually, eventually, even the Master of Offices would have to admit defeat in the silent contest they were playing and send someone who was reasonable. It was a numbers game, and you—I—had learned patience.)

  You regarded the man thoughtfully, assessing, not letting your gaze linger too long, climb too high. One sweep up and then down again, careful not to meet his eyes, which were lowered according to the custom.

  Custom. Taboo. It was skirting perilously near for you even to glance up at the man’s face from across the room. The official pronouncement was that seven ells was safe. Seven ells: over twenty-six feet. You should really be standing up by the jewelled nightingale, if you wanted to look anyone near the door in the face.

  Cliopher sayo Mdang was about the same age as Ludvic the guard, a decade or so younger than yourself: probably still in his thirties, even early thirties. He had golden-brown skin, broad shoulders, and silky black hair cut short in the style used by the Service. He was perhaps more fit than the usual run of secretaries, if the drape of his robes was any indication. He was clearly nervous, by the faint tremble in his hands, but performed the obeisance with only minor hesitation.